Subverting Standard, empowered immaterial

Abstract

The immaterial is a story that narrates history, memory, experience, judgments and actions, expressed through tangible, material traces that define uniqueness. Craftsmen acutely sense and understand the immaterial realm. Their understandings lay framework and open gateways to new architectural form and design possibility. These traces create, but also contaminate the perfectly pristine and idealized state of our cognitive reality and conflict with the intentions of mass-production.

Every immaterial situation induces a material reality. It is material that records immaterial narratives as we engage in the process of making a meaningful world, and a deeper understanding of them makes a more meaningful world. Life’s variances create equally variant material counterparts, unique in their own rite. Yet when the most prevalent method of making – mass-production, predicated on consistency, expectancy, and accuracy – homogenizes or erases the variant and unique, by wiping material clean of its immateriality, what meaningfulness is actually made? Duplicated appearances and increased accessibility to material appearances have bland and alienated our material experiences, both for users and makers alike.

Man’s alienation from the material world has grown wider, yielding a more meaningless world, expedited by hypermodernity – lightness, acceleration, and instantaneous accessibility. To keep pace with vanishing time, materiality itself has lost dimensionality and permanence. The immaterial vanishes, no longer recordable, as do our experiences with material. Our interactions, exchanges, and repercussions of decisions are brief, if perceivable at all. History and memory are easily erasable. An exploration into empowered immaterial, the ‘impossibility of a perfect state’, as catalysts for a never-before-seen process of design and construction can reveal untapped material potential.